Historic Catastrophes: Tales of Tragedy and Unforgettable Disaster

A Nineteenth Century Disaster in Pennsylvania

Western Pennsylvania experienced the heaviest rainfall ever recorded there in late May, 1889, when up to 10 inches fell in a 24-hour period. As Lake Conemaugh’s water levels rose ominously on May 31^st, the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club’s manager led laborers in frantic efforts to unclog the dam’s spillway. They were unsuccessful, and attempts to dig a new spillway also failed. Around 2:50 PM, the dam, which contained nearly four billion gallons of water, began to collapse. A wall of water thirty to forty feet high and as wide as the Mississippi River rushed downstream at speeds of up to forty miles per hour, and destroyed all in its path. The torrent sucked people from their homes, swept trains, and slammed massive piles of debris into bridges and buildings.

2209 people were killed in the disaster, including 400 children. Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati, 400 miles away. More than 1600 homes were demolished, and the damage was around $5 billion in current dollars. It was America’s deadliest non-hurricane flood. As the shock wore off, it was replaced by anger as people’s gazes turned towards those responsible. However, the private resort’s rich owners were never held accountable. They claimed that their modifications of the dam made no difference because they had only lowered it by one foot, and their lawyers argued that the flood was “an act of God”. Evidence emerged in 2013 that they had actually lowered the dam by three feet, which drastically increased the risk of a breach. That came too late for the victims: they lost every case brought against the resort’s owners, who walked off scot-free.

Yet Another Catastrophe in Mao’s China

Bad as the Johnstown Flood was, its destructiveness paled in comparison to this next disaster, the Banqiao Dam Collapse. The toxic fruits of Mao’s Great Leap Forward continued to inflict misery upon China for many years, long after it was wrapped up. While the program was still a going concern, Mao’s government had what was on its face a good idea: build a series of dams, to retain water and provide hydroelectricity. They were built with the help of Soviet experts, but in what turned out to be a bad idea, costs and time were cut by cutting corners on safety – especially flood control safety. A chief engineer blew the whistle on the danger, but he was ignored, accused of lacking communist zeal, and exiled. One of those dams was constructed at Banqiao, on the Ru River in Henan.

It stood 387-feet-high, and had a storage capacity of 17.4 billion cubic feet. The dam was rated to withstand “a thousand-year flood”, that is it was deemed safe against any flood other than one so severe that odds were that it would happen only once in a millennium. It took considerably less than a millennium for such a flood to arrive. A dam strong enough to withstand anything but a fluke thousand-year flood was sound in theory. As it turned out, however, planners had either miscalculated what a thousand-year flood was, or Mao’s China was simply unlucky. Either way, in early August, 1975, Typhoon Nina struck, stalled over the Banqiao Dam area, and produced flooding double the anticipated thousand-year-level maximum. Even then, what came to be known as The Banqiao Dam Disaster could have been averted if not for incompetence and poor communications.

A Dam Disaster That Killed Hundreds of Thousands

On August 6^th, 1975, as water levels rose in Banqiao’s reservoirs, officials requested authority to open the dam to relieve the pressure. They were turned down because of ongoing flooding downstream. The request was finally approved the following day, the 7^th, but the telegram failed to reach Banqiao. In the early hours of August 8^th, the water crested a foot above the dam’s wave protection wall, and it collapsed. The resultant Banqiao Disaster was history’s worst structural failure. The Banqiao Dam was one of 62 dams that collapsed because of Typhoon Nina. When it gave way, it released almost sixteen billion cubic meters of water. They produced a wave 6.2 miles wide and 10 to 23 feet high, that rushed downstream at 31 miles an hour. It left a swath of devastation 9.3-miles-wide and 34-miles-long.

The collapsed dam unleashed history’s third deadliest flood ever, devastated thirty cities and counties, inundated three million acres, and destroyed almost seven million houses. Over ten million people were impacted, and the death toll might have been as high as 240,000. The disaster occurred at the tail end of Mao’s regime and his Cultural Revolution. That was yet another bad idea that produced years of turmoil, because Mao wanted to retain power by getting rival communist factions to fight each other, and leave him as arbitrator. China’s government did its best to hide the extent of the disaster. Solid information – or as solid as governmental information ever gets in China – did not emerge until the 1990s. The extent of the disaster finally came to light when a former Minister of Water Resources wrote a preface for a book, in which details were revealed for the first time.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Association of State Dam Safety Officials – Case Study: Banqiao Dam (China, 1975)

Atlantic, The, December 2^nd, 2014 – Bhopal: the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster, 30 Years Later

China Project – A 17^th-Century Mushroom Cloud: The Wanggongchang Explosion

Daily Beast – How the US Government Enforced Prohibition by Poisoning Americans

Daily Beast – The Giant Space Rock That Wiped Out Biblical Sodom

Encyclopedia Britannica – Sodom and Gomorrah

Fortweekly, The, April, 2018 – Curio #1: The Erfurt Latrinensturz

Gizmodo – China’s Worst Self-Inflicted Environmental Disaster: The Campaign to Wipe Out the Common Sparrow

History Collection – Historic Military Blunders That Will Make You Feel Better About Your Own Mistakes

History Network – How America’s Most Powerful Men Caused America’s Deadliest Flood

International Atomic Energy Agency – The Radiological Accident in Goiana

Irish Examiner, June 21^st, 1875 – The Great Fire in Dublin. Thirty Five Houses Destroyed

Irish Times, August 3^rd, 2016 – The Night a River of Whiskey Ran Through the Streets of Dublin

McCullough, David G. – The Johnstown Flood (2004)

New York Times, December 11^th, 1984 – Indian Journalist Offered Warning

Science, New Series, Vol. 238, No. 4830 (Nov 20, 1987) – Radiation Accident Grips Goiana

Science Times – Erfurt Latrine Disaster

Scientific Reports, 11, Article Number: 18632 (2021) – A Tunguska Sized Airburst Destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle Bronze Age City in the Jordan Valley Near the Dead Sea

Slate – The Chemists’ War

Timeline – The Deadliest Structural Failure in History Might Have Killed 170,000, and China Tried to Cover it Up

Time Magazine, January 14^th, 2015 – The History of Poisoned Alcohol Includes an Unlikely Culprit: The US Government

Vox – The US Government Once Poisoned Alcohol to Get People to Stop Drinking

Weather Underground – The Deadliest Weather-Related Catastrophe You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

World of Chinese – The Blast That Nearly Destroyed Beijing